Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

As the IT manager for our two-building campus, I collaborate closely with our Managed Service Provider to leverage Auvik Network Management for comprehensive monitoring of our network infrastructure, including switches, firewalls, access points, and other typical small business network devices.

We chose Auvik Network Management to gain better visibility into our network, with real-time alerts for any device going offline, while also providing a centralized location for backing up all our device configurations.

While the dynamic map's initial behavior took some getting used to, the UI itself is fairly straightforward. Once I figured out the filters and other controls, I've found it to be quite user-friendly.

The clear network map with hover-over information for nodes and connections has been a big help. It not only visualizes the network layout but also provides details on how the connections function. Auvik's insights helped in pinpointing my VLAN misconfiguration earlier on, making troubleshooting a breeze.

Auvik offers a near real-time view of our network allowing me to diagnose traffic issues based on patterns or user reports. However, it seems Auvik double-counts traffic on our core switch's stacked lag links, making it unclear if we're seeing total traffic or just lag traffic. This is because Auvik reports on the virtual lag ports, their member interfaces, and the switch's stacking ports, which can sometimes be misleading when mixed with regular traffic data. Overall, Auvik is still helpful for monitoring historical traffic trends.

The network map and dashboard offer full visibility of our entire network's health, including any current issues thanks to the integrated central alarm station that displays known outages and potential problems.

While I wasn't involved in the initial deployment, Auvik is a significant improvement over my prior experience with open-source management platforms. It offers a much more centralized view, making it easier to see all devices and their connections.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on the setup, maintenance, and issue resolution. Pulling switch configurations simplifies tasks like replacing equipment or troubleshooting. Having the configuration readily available allows us to see things like traffic patterns, which can help pinpoint issues like port misconfigurations, without needing to delve into switch menus and trace information through tables.

I love that Auvik manages all of the credentials for me. It's incredibly convenient to have both SNMP monitoring and remote terminal access available through the web interface, no matter where I am. This gives me great visibility into my network devices.

It would be useful if network monitoring tools could differentiate between traffic on individual physical ports and traffic on logical interfaces like LAGs or bonded interfaces. Ideally, the tool would also recognize and remove duplicate traffic counts within the overall flow metrics. While solutions like Auvik might not currently offer this functionality, tools like NetBox can be helpful for documenting physical layer connections. It would be interesting to see if Auvik would consider incorporating features to document these physical layer details alongside the logical network configuration, especially for long-term network management within an organization. This could provide valuable insights into how physical infrastructure translates to network behavior.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two and a half years.

Auvik Network Management is a reliable system with occasional minor login issues that occur infrequently.

Auvik has responded fairly well as we've made changes to our network, but we haven't grown rapidly enough to see it try to scale.

While I wasn't part of the initial network setup, I'm familiar with adding and modifying devices. Luckily, Auvik seems to catch these changes automatically.

Our Managed Service Provider used a consultant to implement Auvik for us.

I would rate Auvik Network Management eight out of ten.

Auvik is generally low-maintenance. While I occasionally verify switch imports and credentials when adding new devices, I haven't encountered any need for regular, active maintenance of the product itself.

Auvik Network Management offers filtering views and adjustable time scales, which are valuable features once you discover them. Additionally, you can manually add devices that the discovery tool misses, such as unmanaged switches, for full network visibility. This covers most of your visibility needs.

We rely on Auvik Network Management for a comprehensive network solution, utilizing it to monitor the health of all our devices and maintain up-to-date backups of their configurations.

We implemented Auvik Network Management to streamline onboarding new network devices across our global network. It also provides proactive alerts for outages, allowing us to address them before they impact users. Additionally, Auvik facilitates swift restoration from backups if an issue proves unsolvable.

Auvik and SaaS Management complement each other well. The Auvik portal's single pane of glass interface provides a seamless user experience, allowing us to easily switch to the SaaS product. While their data may not be directly integrated, these two separate products offer valuable functionalities. SaaS Management helps identify shadow IT by tracking user sign-ins to company accounts, and Auvik excels in network backup and monitoring.

Organizations using Auvik with a concern about shadow IT across various groups can leverage SaaS Management for efficient discovery. This tool provides insights into user account sign-ins and application usage, giving you a more comprehensive view beyond just the network monitoring capabilities offered by Auvik.

Auvik boasts a user-friendly interface that organizes information by office location, allowing for quick access to individual sites. Additionally, a global alert portal provides a centralized view of issues across our entire network.

The network map and dashboard provide a near real-time view of how our network is connected, with about 90 percent accuracy. It's a big improvement, especially since it's automated and now supports switch stacks, allowing us to see not only if there's a stack but also how many members it has within the map itself.

Auvik's user-friendly network map automatically lays out our entire network, allowing us to quickly click on any device and delve into its specific details for in-depth analysis.

We saw the benefits of Auvik almost immediately after deploying it. Once we set up SNMP, a requirement for the software, and entered the discovery credentials, we were able to roll it out to multiple offices. Within days, we had all the locations monitored and backed up.

Auvik has significantly improved our ability to resolve network issues quickly. By allowing us to examine alert logs for potential precursors to outages, and to determine if the problem is widespread or confined to a single location or device, Auvik significantly reduces our mean time to resolution.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and resolution. We are able to use that saved time to work on other projects that we are trying to roll out. 

Auvik's most valuable features are the combined monitoring and backup functionalities. With strategically placed collectors worldwide, we can proactively address potential issues through real-time monitoring and email alerts. Furthermore, Auvik's backups ensure data recovery even in the case of unforeseen circumstances.

I would like Auvik to offer an alternative method for backing up devices that don't support or have SNMP disabled, since currently, SNMP seems to be a prerequisite for any functionality in Auvik. This would be helpful for legacy devices that might not be compatible with SNMP.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two years.

Auvik Network Management is stable because it is a SaaS service.

It is easy to scale Auvik Network Management in under 30 minutes.

Auvik's technical support has been generally helpful, although we haven't been able to find a solution for managing our older devices that lack SNMP compatibility.

Positive

We transitioned from BackBox, an on-premise backup solution, to Auvik, a cloud-based SaaS platform. This switch not only simplified data management with cloud storage but also provided network monitoring capabilities that BackBox lacked.

The initial deployment of Auvik was easy. We set up a couple of sites for POC and for a lot of the locations, we used the same SNMP credentials so it was able to discover it all and start monitoring within a few hours.

The deployment took a few months to complete because we had multiple locations globally to roll out and it was not the only project we were working on.

During the initial POC and testing phase, we received assistance from an Auvik onboarding technician. Following this, we were able to independently deploy the solution to our other locations.

Auvik Network Management is moderately priced.

I would rate Auvik Network Management nine out of ten.

Auvik does not require maintenance from our end.

Ensure you have SNMP credentials and a dedicated service account for TACX prepared on all your devices. Most companies likely already have a service account available. However, for Auvik to monitor and back up your devices, create a separate service account with read-only access specifically for Auvik.

As an MSP, we install Auvik on our managed service clients' networks to gain a comprehensive view of their network layout. This allows us to monitor overall network health, receive performance metrics, and identify outages across all SNMP-manageable devices like firewalls and switches. While Auvik excels in network device monitoring, we rely on other tools for managing aspects like Windows systems.

In larger environments, we typically deploy a dedicated agent directly on the network for comprehensive scanning and monitoring. For smaller environments, a cloud-based agent provides a more efficient solution.

Auvik provides a close to real-time picture of our network.

Integrating with a network map might seem straightforward, but the complexity depends on the network size. Larger networks require more effort. Fortunately, most of our clients have relatively small setups, typically one to two sites, two to three firewalls, and five to six switches. This keeps our integration time to a maximum of thirty minutes, making it a quick process to get them up and running.

While entry-level technicians don't heavily rely on Auvik for troubleshooting itself, they do benefit from its automated ticketing system. Auvik alerts them to device outages, allowing them to perform basic troubleshooting. If the issue persists, they can escalate the ticket to an engineer, who can then leverage both the technician's initial efforts and the information provided by Auvik for further diagnosis.

Auvik has significantly improved our ability to resolve issues quickly. It saves me at least 30 minutes per ticket because I no longer need to remote into individual network environments and run diagnostic tools manually. With Auvik, I can pull up an overview of the network, saving valuable time on troubleshooting, updates, and other tasks.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution.

I like Auvik's detailed device dashboards that show everything from uptime to configuration revisions. The new Northstar feature is particularly useful for troubleshooting network path issues. When someone reports slowness or connectivity problems, Northstar quickly maps the device's connection path, helping pinpoint or narrow down where the problem might lie.

Auvik's interface can appear cluttered at times, reflecting its feature-rich nature, but despite some occasional messiness, it remains fairly intuitive for new users.

It would be helpful to suppress credential prompts for specific sites in Auvik. Currently, we have to dismiss the "enter credentials" or "new devices found" alerts for each site, which can be repetitive. An ideal solution would be a per-site checkbox to indicate that we've discovered all the devices we expect on that network and don't want to be prompted for credentials again. This would streamline our workflow and eliminate the need to dismiss repetitive messages.

While Auvik offers good integrations with SNMP, WMI, and VMware, there's room for improvement with Hyper-V, a platform we heavily rely on. Additionally, enhanced UPS integration would be valuable, particularly for alerting on critical events like a switch to battery power, which currently seems to be missing. This limitation may be specific to our UPS setup, but improved UPS monitoring within Auvik would be beneficial.

The speed and performance can be improved.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two years.

Auvik Network Management can be a bit slow at times, causing us to wait for it to fully load information. While it doesn't crash frequently, occasional lags can interrupt the workflow.

Our experience with Auvik's scalability is positive. While very large networks with many sites and devices can experience slow loading times, this isn't a concern for most of our clients, who typically have just a few sites. For the handful of larger clients we do have, sub-dividing their networks into smaller groups has mostly addressed performance issues. Even our largest client, with its complex network of eight core switches, 20 labs, and a main firewall, only experiences minor slowdowns when loading everything at once. Overall, Auvik's scalability seems well-suited for the needs of our client base.

In the past, I reached out to Auvik support a few times regarding general SNMP issues, where I had trouble getting Auvik to communicate properly with some devices.

My communication with Auvik technical support was via email, a back-and-forth process with replies within a few hours, which is fairly typical. While it took a few days to resolve and initially involved directing me to the knowledge base, the support escalated to someone who identified the specific fix needed. Overall, it wasn't exceptional but certainly not substandard either.

Neutral

The overall setup of Auvik is straightforward. One person is enough to handle the deployments.

I would rate Auvik Network Management nine out of ten.

Having used similar network monitoring tools in the past, I was already somewhat familiar with the core functionality of Auvik when I joined the organization.

I recommend Auvik Network Management. While the training and documentation are helpful, hands-on experience is key. In my case, after reading the manual, I dove right in with a client's network and spent a few hours exploring the software. This practical learning made a big difference during my first rollout, as I had a much better understanding of Auvik's capabilities. Having prior experience with network monitoring tools like Nagios and OpenNMS helped as well, since they share a similar core concept of agent-based monitoring and network mapping. This familiarity made Auvik relatively easy to pick up.

We primarily use the solution for traffic insights or traffic monitoring. It's for network management. While we're also using it for managing some of our network devices, the main reason for this was traffic insights.

The network map can provide a full network visibility or maybe just partial - it depends. For me, for my use case, it gives me plenty of visibility and also sends me alerts. I can set up different alerts based on enterprise system utilization and things like that. For my use case, it does pretty much everything I need it to, and it can do a lot more than I'm using it for.

The traffic insights are excellent. It's amazing how it works. There are really well built features on it. It's not a very common feature that you see in a lot of these network management tools. It's a game-changer. 

The setup is amazing. Most of the work is automatic. You just set it up, and then it just does its own thing.

The interface is pretty straightforward. The dashboard is there. There are some advanced features as well. 

They walk you through everything. If you need some help with something, like, navigating or something, they'll help. They provide ongoing support. If I need to find out anything about any feature, I can just set up a call with them, and they will walk me through it. 

The ease of access is pretty straightforward. I had used the solution in the past, but not as much. Maybe just to check a device's status here and there, but not to the point of deploying and using it heavily. However, then I found out about the traffic insights and the other features they offer. We bought some licenses internally and deployed them to our team sites, and now I use them much more. It's not very intimidating. The navigation and layout are easy.

The network map gives a real-time picture of the network. If you have a network set up right, it gives you a nice overview. 

The map I use is usually when I'm deploying a new site. That's when I try to make sure everything is there. I get a real quick overview to make sure everything is adapted - instead of going down into inventory and going through each single line item. Instead, I can just look at the map. 00:08:53 Speaker 0

I saw the benefit before implementing it when I was doing my research. Auvik was one of the very few solutions that had the features I was looking for. That's why I signed up for the trial. Immediately, I knew it's what I was looking for. Once you sign up for the trial, they send you an invite for a call to go over everything.

The meantime to resolution has improved. Let's say you have just one source of visibility on your network where you are relying just on your controller or something like that; then, of course, it will take a lot longer to get to the issue. Auvik shows all the nodes or all the devices online, and it makes it much faster to resolve these issues. 

Auvik allows me to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution. The setup is especially well thought-out. You just create a site and install a collector, and it does most of the work. It searches for networks and asks if you want to add them.

It sometimes lags, especially in larger deployments. There's a little bit of an issue there where if you're trying to open the Auvik network map, however, for the most part, it's pretty straightforward. It works pretty well.

Recently, I have noticed they are having some issues with the cloud instances where it was causing some issues. It could be more responsive.

For traffic insights, if there is a way to export or automate exports, that would be something I would love to see, especially in the traffic insights. 

I started using the solution in November, 2023.

I'd rate stability eight out of ten. We had an issue earlier this year, however, other than that, it's been solid. 

I'd rate scalability ten out of ten. It's easy to add more sites. 

I've called technical support twice. Both times, they were pretty responsive and knowledgeable, and they resolved my issue immediately. The engineers are great.

Positive

I've used a couple of alternatives, including PRTG. There may have been better performance, however, nothing provided the amount of insights. You can really narrow down the data.

The initial setup was really easy. They have a nice knowledge base as well. It's really streamlined. They also have device-specific configuration help as well. If you want something particular, they have guides for that.

In our case, we're using a lot of Ubiquiti devices, and they have a knowledge base specifically for that, which allows you to see more information. There's documentation for Cisco, for Juniper, et cetera. 

I handled most of the deployment myself. We're often adding sites and for the most part, we can have a site done in less than half a day. It might take an hour or two to get it up and running. If you have a bunch of sites to do, it will obviously take longer. 

The pricing is great. For some organizations, it may be expensive if they're managing every single device. However, it's priced pretty fairly.

Part of it is modular, so you can make it as extensive as you want, and that depends on how much management you are doing. If you are managing a lot of devices for CI,it can get expensive. They only charge for managed devices. Any critical device I'm managing, I'm paying for. However, I'm only managing physical devices on my sites. I'm not managing non-critical devices. 

I'm a customer.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use Auvik to gain visibility into our network across multiple locations. 

If you only want a better overview of your network, you will see the benefits immediately. And if something happens a few months later, you will have a powerful troubleshooting tool. It's a single pane of glass where you can see all your devices and try to coordinate between them to figure out where you have problems. It allows you to troubleshoot faster. 

Auvik helps entry-level technicians solve more tickets without assistance. Everything is laid out in the interface, and it gives suggestions about how to remedy a problem. For example, Auvik will highlight mistakes in a configuration between different devices and say, "Hey, you missed something." Our junior staff are not necessarily troubleshooting. They're often collecting information for a high-level engineer, and they can gather that information more easily. It will be easier for the senior engineer to troubleshoot faster. The more information you have at your fingertips, the better. 

Auvik enables you to export all your ports on your switch, and when they are connected to the switch, Auvik lets you set up a battery. For example, we are in the middle of a data center migration, and this feature was helpful. 

We have multiple locations, and navigating or switching between them is easy. It was quite straightforward to implement. The automatic network discovery feature makes things simple.  Sometimes, you might find switches that you didn't realize existed. Of course, it depends on how well-organized you are. 

Auvik comes with multiple automatic alerts, which you can tweak to make it more helpful. For example, we had a couple of devices connected to some ports that were showing many dropped packets. We had no idea about this before we implemented Auvik. It allowed us to troubleshoot all the problems and gave us alerts about the misconfigurations. 

You need to have a little technical expertise, but the interface is well-designed. There are still a few things that they can improve, but Auvik listens to the customers. If I tell them I want to see something, they usually put it on the roadmap. 

Auvik's network map gives you close to a real-time picture of the network if you set it up properly. For instance, if I have connectivity issues between two devices, I can see a warning message, and it's flagged on the network map in a different color.  

The alerts can always be improved. I have raised this issue with Auvik, and they are working to fix the event correlation and alerts. There is always room to improve the interface. When you have multiple sites, it would be nice to have a way to see the connectivity between them. I have one extension between my data centers, so I'd like to see if something goes down or if I cannot point to anything on my side.

They have a drop-down on the left to connect to your disconnected location. They call them locations. There is a map on the higher level where you see where your data centers are located, and you see a color code for an error or a warning in a location. However, you can't see if the communication between the two locations is up and running properly.

We have used Auvik for about six to eight months.

I haven't had any problems with Auvik's stability. They give us advanced notice when there will be downtime for maintenance. 

It's hard to say how scalable Auvik is. I only have three data centers. We've had some meetings with them where we've talked about adding more locations. It's scalable enough for our needs. Adding another data center won't be an issue. 

I rate Auvik customer support 10 out of 10. Their support is excellent, and their AI chat is helpful. When I have questions, the chatbot quickly points me in the right direction. It connects me immediately if I need to talk to one of their technical people. You'll get a callback in five minutes. 

Positive

We didn't have a tool like Auvik, but we used a combination of tools that did the same thing but were not within the same pane of glass. Auvik's advantage is that it gives you a unified view of all your different departments. If I wanted to troubleshoot something, I had to manually go to each switch and correlate the event. Now, I have them all in one place.

We have VMware, and we installed the Auvik agent as a virtual machine. The rest is uploaded to the cloud, so you could consider it a hybrid deployment. The implementation was straightforward. We primarily handled the implementation ourselves, but we go through an MSP model for the licenses. The initial deployment was short. It took us a couple of days per site. We spent some additional time fine-tuning and customizing things. We had a two-person team for all three sites. 

Auvik's licensing model is straightforward and easy to understand. You only pay for the network devices, not endpoint machines. For example, if I have 100 machines attached to one network device, I will buy a license for one device instead of 100 machines. I feel like it's a good value. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. It helps during implementation to have solid information about your environment's configuration. That will help speed up the implementation because it uses SMP to collect data from your devices. It helps to know your public and private keys and the versions of all your devices. 

Our network monitoring solution for our clients' sites is Auvik Network Management. With over 60 sites under our care, Auvik helps us efficiently monitor their network uptime and performance. It utilizes data collection, remote tunneling, and device management functionalities to provide us with a comprehensive view of each network's health.

The interface is reasonable and for the most part, operates as we need.

The network map dashboard offers a near real-time view of our network activity. While targeting specific devices for monitoring can be straightforward once set up, initial configuration may require some effort to fine-tune for optimal results. We are able to see 85 percent visibility into our network.

The benefits of Auvik became apparent within the first three months. It provided us with the network visibility we craved. We could now easily see the entire configuration of an environment, allowing us to quickly assess and understand what we were managing. Onboarding a new client became a breeze. Auvik granted us a complete view of their network, including VLANs. The collector itself was also easy to install.

Auvik allows us to spend less time on setup, maintenance, and issue resolution.

Auvik's GUI is user-friendly and well-designed. While there's room for improvement in some aspects of device targeting, overall I find it to be a positive experience. The device management features, particularly credential management and network discovery, are especially valuable. These functionalities streamline the process of identifying and managing all the devices on our network.

I'd like to see an improvement in how we target individual devices. Currently, we can only target a single device by including it within a large SaaS 32 subnet, which is inefficient. Ideally, we should be able to target specific devices directly. This would allow us to include relevant networks and label them accurately, something that's not possible with the current method.

I have been using Auvik Network Management for two years.

We have only encountered one unscheduled outage with Auvik where their website was done.

I would rate the scalability of Auvik Network Management seven out of ten.

The technical support team is responsive and aims to answer inquiries quickly. However, there may be occasions where they encounter issues that require further investigation. In these instances, we have to escalate for a solution.

Neutral

We switched to Auvik because our previous monitoring software, LogicMonitor, was too expensive for our needs.

The initial deployment was straightforward. Five people were involved in the deployment and it took three weeks to complete.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Auvik's pricing model is good.

Our wireless controllers are monitored by Auvik free of charge.

I would rate Auvik Network Management seven out of ten.

Once integrated with our existing system, Auvik requires minimal ongoing maintenance.

Once you've configured the connectors on the site, be mindful during the connector installation process. Make sure your website URLs are accurate. On the technical side, most data transfers from the beta multi-site can be handled automatically. So, if you encounter any errors during installation, they can likely be resolved easily.

Auvik's time-saving features allow us to focus more on critical projects and business initiatives, particularly during our company's renewal phase. Instead of spending time on setup, maintenance, or issue resolution, we can now dedicate our efforts to developing new solutions for managing our next-generation infrastructure, which is crucial in the telecommunications industry.

In terms of improvement, while the network map and dashboards are generally easy to use, the NetFlow app can be a bit compressed and difficult to customize for better readability.

I have been using Auvik for a couple of weeks now. We initially tried out their trial and found their network management features promising, so we decided to subscribe for a month. Since our network infrastructure has grown organically over time, we need a clearer picture before implementing any updates. Auvik is helping us understand our network better.

Auvik's support has been excellent right from the trial phase. Even though we were only at tier one, they were very prompt and helpful. They even helped us solve some tricky configuration issues by granting them access to our dashboard. Their support team is top-notch and very capable. I would rate the support as a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before using Auvik, we tried Zabbix and PRTG for network monitoring, but they didn't provide the topology insights we needed. They focused more on receiving SNMP traps. Auvik stood out for its ability to give us a clear view of our network topology, which was our key requirement.

Setting up Auvik initially was a breeze and it took less than an hour. Whether you are installing it on a physical or virtual machine, the process is straightforward. I used a Docker release on my old Mac desktop and it ran smoothly right out of the box with just a few clicks.

I find Auvik's pricing to be a good value for the features offered. With the professional plan costing around $15.30 per month per device, it is affordable, considering you only pay for active devices like routers and switches. For us, considering our network costs around $400 per month, which we see as a worthwhile investment for the benefits it provides.

I find the Auvik user interface easy to use overall. However, one drawback is that once the network topology map is generated, it is a static view and you can't remove or rearrange devices. This makes it a bit cumbersome to navigate, especially for networks with multiple devices. Exporting the map as a PDF also maintains this static view, which isn't ideal. To work around this, we export the data to Excel and use other tools like draw.io or Visio to redesign the topology for better understanding.

I use Auvik's dashboards, and they generally provide a real-time picture of our network, which is quite accurate. However, there can be some false positives, especially with older devices. The dashboards help understand overall network health. 

Auvik offers free monitoring for all devices except routers and firewalls. This includes devices like network-attached devices, PCs, and printers, making it cost-effective for monitoring a wide range of assets. Additionally, Auvik provides monitoring alerts for device issues, such as low printer paper, adding value beyond just network monitoring.

Overall, I would rate Auvik as a ten out of ten.

We're an MSP, and we use it to manage our customers' networks.

The industries of our customers vary. They are from healthcare, manufacturing, finance, education, etc. It's mainly used to monitor switches, firewalls, ISP connections, and Wi-Fi, such as controllers, etc. It does do some additional monitoring on workstations and servers, but we don't rely on it for that. It's just not what their bread and butter is. So, even though it does that, we don't really focus on that.

We have an MSP portal for accessing all of the different customers. Auvik has an integration with ConnectWise which we never used. We just log in directly to the Auvik portal whenever we need something with Auvik, but they do offer an integration with ConnectWise that we don't take much advantage of.

Switching to Auvik has helped with two main parts. One of them is with time, but we also had difficulty accomplishing what we're now able to accomplish with Auvik. We had several applications that have been replaced by Auvik and several different panes of glass that are all now just in one place. Previously, sometimes, one of those panes of glass had an issue that we didn't find out about until we realized that we missed an alert that should have alerted us. With Auvik, there's the ease of deployment, the reliability, and the consolidation of everything together. That has been huge. It has saved hundreds of hours over six years.

It provides clear visibility into our customers' networks and reliability. I can't stress this enough, but reliability is so key for an MSP. If you're in-house, you have a lot of eyes and involvement in all the different systems, but when you're an MSP, there are many times when you're not going to touch or look at a system unless there's an issue. It may go months like that. For example, we had a switch that died at a customer. I had a level-one tech take down a replacement switch. I logged into Auvik, pulled the configs that were running on the machine, and sent them over to him. He terminaled into the new switch, pasted in the full config, and the customer was back up and running. My tech was on-site for about an hour or less, which included taking out the old switch, moving everything over to the new switch, and programming the new switch. That's incredible. We saved our customer's downtime. We saved ourselves working time on this issue. It was also easy. It was a breeze.

Planning new projects is a breeze now because we have one place we go to. We see all the current network configs. If we're doing a switch upgrade, we see every port that's used on the switch. We see exactly which VLANs are assigned on each port. We see all the configs very easily on all different switches. We can filter on the network map by device type. If there's an issue where one machine is not connecting, we can easily trace which switch it's plugged into. We can trace which uplink it's supposed to go to. We can trace it all the way back to the data center, and very easily, we can track down where the issue is. I rave about Auvik.

It has absolutely helped reduce repetitive, low-priority tasks through automation. We had to install several different platforms and configure several different platforms for each customer. Now, it's one software that we have to install. We do some basic configuration and enter unique credentials. We just configure it once, and it applies to every single customer. It has significantly helped in that regard.

We're not a global company. We're just a national company, but it has helped with the visibility into every one of our customers' networks. It's a total game-changer. It was something that was a significant struggle, which we had ironed out. We had a system that was functional, but it wasn't the best system in place. Auvik has been a game-changer.

Its automation had an effect on our IT team’s availability. They're not as busy with it. They don't need to check up on it as much. When there is an alert, it's very quick and easy to verify, remediate, and check if it is a false positive. We get to know:

• What exactly was the issue?
• Do we have a real issue on our hands?
• What are we going to do about it?
• What's the plan of action?

It has cut our time dealing with a network issue. Now, we probably spend between 20% to 30% of our time, or even less than that, dealing with any network issues. Similarly, it has cut the time by 20% to 30% when it comes to checking on the alerts to see what's going on. Previously, we would've spent a lot more time on that, but now, it's so much easier to remediate an issue that we spend 20% less time on it. Something that would've taken a whole day now literally takes an hour and a half. The whole thing is remediated.

We've been able to significantly cut down on the amount of network expertise required because we don't need every level-two tech to be able to understand the networks, configure the tools, and troubleshoot if something didn't quite work. We cut that down significantly. We just have a couple of people who are network experts, and they are able to handle the full load of what's going on because of the access and the visibility that they get.

It helps us to keep track of the devices that each customer has. There is an incredible export feature using which you can export all the information into a spreadsheet. It does a very nice job on that.

The network map is fantastic. The backup of configs is also valuable. It does SSH into each network device and retains a copy of the configs on the machines as well as the change logs. So, when something suddenly stops, you can compare the configs to see what happened. You can do a side-by-side comparison of the configs to see exactly what changed. That's fantastic. The alerting is great. We get email alerts from them. Those are my favorite features.

It's incredibly easy considering the power and the capabilities that it has. For a tool that can do this much, it's crazy how easy it's to set up and manage. There are some very powerful tools out there, but they also take a lot of configuration, tweaking, and setup. Auvik is quick. It's a breeze. I can have level-one techs setting up a lot of things. I can script out the deployments, and it's done with a few clicks. We can get it up and running, go into the customer's tenant, and just have whoever's setting up the different devices enter the credentials into the portal, and it runs. It's great. This is one of the best MSP tools that I've used. When I factor in the ease of use, the power and capabilities that it has, and just how useful it is, it wouldn't be an exaggeration at all to say this is the best overall MSP tool that I've used. Its ease of use is critical. One of the biggest things with running an MSP team is to make sure that your team can easily use the tool without needing to have a ton of training. That's what MSPs are all about. We can occasionally have a complex tool, but then there's going to be a limited number of people who are familiar with it, which is going to limit our ability to manage it. It's huge for an MSP to be able to have a tool that a tech can use with minimal training.

I didn't find the UI, especially for the network maps, to be so intuitive. Navigating the network map was not so intuitive. It has been awesome for visualizing the network mapping/topology, but it took me a little bit of time to get a hang of how to use their network filter interface. It's not complex. It's just a user interface issue where you realize, "Oh, okay. That's where that button is." It took me a little bit of time to get the hang of that, but that was years ago. It's not complicated. It's just that I wasn't expecting a couple of UI items to be there, but once I realized where they were, it worked great. So, once you know where what you're looking for is, it's just amazing. It's user-friendly. It doesn't have a steep learning curve. Its learning curve is similar to or smaller than any new software that you're adopting. There is a little bit of a learning curve, not super steep. 

We use a lot of Aruba networking products. I know that over the year and a half or two years, they've significantly improved their integration with Aruba products. They can just improve it a little bit more. 

For the last year and a half or so, I've had other people doing a lot of R&D. So, I know that they've come up with a lot of improvements. I felt that for a while, a lot of the improvements weren't things that we cared about. It was good to see that the company is continually trying to grow, expand, and improve its product, but we didn't really feel a lot of improvement. 

We have a few other networking tools. Some of them are specifically for managing Wi-Fi. They have some great features where they give specific recommendations based on the network traffic they're seeing and based on other customers that have had similar issues, or even just by looking at your own data that they're gathering. They give AI-based recommendations on how to improve the network. Auvik could have something like that. It gives us excellent visibility into the network, but if there is a way to include some remediation tips that are digestible by level-one and level-two techs, that would be great. That would be a huge benefit because we still need our level-three network engineers to look into any real network issue. A lot of times, it does feel like this is something that could have been understood by an AI. It could have been an alert such as:

• There's a network loop here.
• We are detecting this device has a mismatched VLAN or something like that. Do you want to look into this?
• Can you confirm that this is the appropriate config, or should it be changed? 

Some sort of remediation-based focus would be awesome. They could just expand the feature set to things that would help us further. These are the things that we would care about.

I have been using Auvik for about six years.

It has been great. I have zero complaints about it. They notify you if there are upgrades that are taking place. The notification is very good. It has been very smooth and very good.

It has been so easy. Once we have the software configured, it's more or less copy-paste for every additional customer that we add. Of course, there are some things, such as credentials, that are unique to each environment, but that's it.

The number of end users that are affected by Auvik could be up to 7,000.

Their support is very good. They also have pretty good documentation. They're easily available by chat and pretty knowledgeable. Every time I've had to reach out to them, it was a pretty smooth experience. I hope it stays that way. I feel that so many companies start off like that, but then a couple of years later, you can barely get through to anyone. It has been great so far, and I hope it stays that way. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. I have no complaints at all. 

Positive

We previously used different solutions, but they weren't direct competitors to this. It was more like we had to cobble things together and through ConnectWise or some other tool, set up our own ping service that would run and then alert us if it doesn't check in for X amount of time to see if the network is down. We had a different solution that would take backups of the configs, but it wasn't a live solution. It wasn't that we had a direct network monitoring competitor that we used. We had to use several other solutions out there to make up for all the different functionalities that Auvik now provides.

It was straightforward. It did take some time, as you would expect for a tool with such power and capabilities. It took some time, like every such tool would take, but overall, it was probably less than what you would expect considering what the capabilities are. So, it was straightforward and simple. It wasn't complicated. It didn't take a lot. You spend an hour on the phone with them. They'll walk you through all the different places where you'll configure everything. If you compare it to ConnectWise's RMM, ConnectWise's RMM is probably five times or even more complicated than this. You need an expert for that, whereas you don't need to hire an expert to handle Auvik. You can handle it all on your own.

We implemented it on our own. We had just one person for deployment. It started to be implemented several months before I took over, and there was just one person. When he left, I took over the full management and handling of the configuration of the tool. Since then, I've delegated it to another person, and he just handles it himself. He checks with me occasionally if there's something he is unsure about, but that's been almost nonexistent. One person should be enough to configure it for a bunch of places.

In terms of maintenance, it's very lightweight. It rarely needs tweaking.

We have absolutely seen time-to-value with Auvik. We have also seen a significant reduction in our mean time to resolution (MTTR). It's one of my favorite tools. When I go to trade shows and talk to people, I feel that it's just the easiest sell because it's so easy. There's no, "Oh, well, you have to choose which features you want, and we like this." I literally have so little to quibble about with this.

It was worth every penny that we paid for it. It's not necessarily the cheapest. I don't know what its current price is. I haven't been involved in the pricing part of it for a couple of years. I know that a couple of years ago, it was a bit pricey, but it saved us many times over the cost that we were paying for it.

To someone comparing network monitoring solutions but concerned about pricing, I would say that I understand the initial concern, but just look into it and do the math on how much money this can save you. It's a drop in the bucket.

I wasn't the one who researched it originally. The director of IT started implementing Auvik about six months before he left, and then I took over. I did look into a bunch of other ones because I always keep an eye on the market and what the vendors are offering. Occasionally, we have to change our solutions. So, we're always looking to see what fits our needs the best. In six years, I haven't found anything that has made me seriously think twice about swapping it out for Auvik.

To someone who is just starting out with Auvik, I would advise having a plan of what you want to accomplish with Auvik so that you can configure it properly right off the bat. You should know what you want to accomplish, what type of alerts you want, and what type of things you care about. It'll make your life so much easier because you can then just go and configure it very easily, instead of trying to figure out what you're trying to do while configuring it, which was some of what we did. We didn't quite know what it was capable of, how reliable it was, and how much we wanted to move the functionality over to Auvik versus using the current system. Once we did get past that point of having a clear idea of what we wanted from Auvik, everything was a breeze.

It has been such a game-changer in our network management. I can go on and on. It's one of the most awesome, incredible tools that I recommend to everybody. I have not seen any other competitor tool that even comes close to what they do. To me, it's just a no-brainer. Especially if you're an MSP, or if you have a complex network to manage, just get Auvik. It's going to make your life so much easier.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. It's one of my favorite MSP tools to use and talk about. It's incredible.